note: tech sociopath apologists in this thread will be removed and banned for everyone’s best interests
Can I ask a sincere question? whats a tech sociopath apologist, could you demonstrate an example?
Again, im sincerely genuinely asking
Someone who takes it on themselves to act as apologist for the words/actions of tech sociopaths
Often seen as “weird nerds coming to defense of $x” (such as musk, or in this case the kagi dudebro)
(And then I glanced at your post history and noticed a trend of JAQing off so I now doubt whether you’re sincere in asking)
Im not sure what JAQing is.
I appreciate your response thanks
Short for Just Asking Questions. Where people ask loaded questions that act as a veneer to their actual statements. If you want to accuse them of the fact they are talking shit, they’ll say they’re “just skeptical” and “asking questions”
Just asking questions here, but do you think a wolverine would beat a mechabadger?
yes, I’ve seen it
that wasnt my intention. It was simply a phrase I hadn’t heard
that wasn’t my intention
Ironically, by saying that you’re just doing The Thing again
JAQing
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions first hit (on google ;) ) which has a good explanation.
I call that doing a “Tucker Carlson.”
He does jaq off pretty constantly.
I had a weird brainfart a while back when I realized that Carlson reminds me of this guy.
The bad faith ‘bugs that think are offensive’ debate guy from starship troopers. He even wears a bow tie!
yyyyeaahhhhh
We have even better solutions for them!
Y’all are wild. Doesn’t it get boring congratulating each other for having the same opinions? You could just talk to yourself, you know.
I’m not interested in continuing this conversation. Any reply to this messags is unwanted harrasment.
no, unwanted harassment is me telling you to go fuck yourself
also, who in the fuck were you talking to? do you often wander into subs and demand nobody replies to your shitty posts?
but why is mr wonka so easily offended? all I did was feed myself into the machine that makes chocolate chips but he called me a stupid motherfucker while his staff sang a jaunty tune
he’s probably just triggered. RENT FREE
You sound like a immature, troubled soul. Were you by any chance a reddit mod before?
Seeing how successful Kagi is when run by someone who actively sets their own money on fire for no reason almost makes me want to try and start a search engine company. I mean I couldn’t do it any worse right? And there is a market for it.
Well the article says they have 16 (half are only half time) employees working between at least 5 projects, so it looks pretty possible, and most of the smaller engines are made by one or two people
Kagi basically admits they’re just piggybacking off of Google, Bing, et al, so getting into the space shouldn’t be a serious PITA.
yall really are making me want to massively overextend and start that federated search engine project based on human-driven indexing and whichever APIs each instance wants to query and cache. yes, like a fancy web directory
maybe this is a good idea for a FreeAssembly project once Philthy’s in a good state? it’s a better idea than starting a shitty Wikipedia clone at least
Omg so much tech jargon in this comment
welcome to TechTakes!
no, welcome wasn’t the right word now was it
(feels quite fucky to type the following without coming across as a naysayer; not quite the intended meaning, but… I guess you’ll see)
it’d probably be cool if this could exist, but also there’s a couple of extremely hard problems in going for it, along with a couple of (to my current knowledge) entirely unsolved ones
one of the presently-unsolved things I know of is that we don’t yet have anything like scalable performant homomorphic encryption so there’s no way to do fully-private query operations on a dataset, which thus gives way to the operator snooping space combined with user privacy angles. there are some technical solutions to some aspects of this, and a number of social things that would apply too
might be interesting either way
definitely a hell of a big project.
Personally: I’d love to, but I have a conflicting non-compete so I’d definitely have to quit my job first and I’m not ready for that level of adulting. The good news is that if I ever do quit I’ll have a lot of relevant skills
maybe this is something you’re looking for idk https://github.com/StractOrg/stract they have their own index and their own crawler
It’s very similar to the feeling you get when you read a very middle-quality novel, innit?
I resemble that remark
Can I sincerely ask what we’re supposed to use instead?
Kagi has given me the best search experience ive had in at least a decade, I’m not going back to the enshittification engine, and everything else is just bing in fancy wrapping paper. Is there something else like Kagi? Is there something like DDG or Searx that arent just slightly better bing?
Also looking for answers. I’ve been a Kagi convert for 5 months now and it has absolutely saved me time and effort.
I was looking at Perplexity but it isn’t exactly the same.
You may want to have a look at this list for possible alternatives
Feel entirely free to use Kagi, just remember that it’s run by an idiot and could blow up at any moment.
Apologies, my question wasn’t rhetorical, I was genuinely looking for suggestions. I don’t want to use kagi if this is who is running it… BUT all the alternatives that I’m personally aware of are not options for replacement.
basically the whole area is gallopping enshittification. Until this blowup, I had seriously been considering Kagi too.
Guess it’s time to spin up a local search indexer…
https://search.marginalia.nu/ is the only actually good search engine.
ok but for real… it’s not great for finding actual answers to queries, but I find like 800x more interesting results with search.marginalia.nu than any other search engine. It’s the only search engine that I find actively fun to just browse around on recreationally.
it’s not great for finding actual answers to queries, but I find like 800x more interesting results
Dunno if this is just poorly phrased or… Finding actual answers to queries is the only job of a search engine, what does “interesting” mean here?
You can use a search engine to explore the world wide web and find curious little pages made by real human beings. Google et al. and the SEO twats have made that mostly impossible without drastic measures.
For me instantly evoked the memory of using the internet from when I first got to access it (~92) until 2012…2014ish, years I could describe as “the party is emptying, not as big as earlier”, vs 2014…2016 which I’d describe as having definite “okay there’s only 3 people left on the dancefloor” vibes (and the downslope started being felt 2008…2009 already, but slowly, only later more pronounced).
It was a time when you truly could just randomly browse search results and find all kinds of interesting things. It’s hard to convey, in today’s ecosystem, what that felt like. The fedi scratches a similar itch, but it feels (and I don’t mean this as criticism) more “a diamond in the muck”, a glimmer of hope in a sea of awful. A general optimism was quite prevalent among the internet of then, even despite it also having its awful aspects
I have years of irc logs in multiple channels, filled with the shared experiences of years of people delighting and gaping and pointing at all kinds of stuff like this. And things rarely feel the same.
I will never forgive the walled gardens for what they took from all of us, for what they destroyed
I can’t remember the names of the projects, but there are actually some self hosted search engines that I keep meaning to get around to actually installing on “Ullr”
There are a couple, though the quality varies. Mojeek and marginalia seem to be good alternatives personally
thanks a lot for shouting us out, Marginalia is also impressive (basically a one-person project etc.), the random button is delightful
I’m in a forum where some person claims that the sealion is actually the reasonable one.
It’s proof to me that this throwaway comic is such a good summary for certain online behavior that there’s an entire subculture built around trying to subvert it.
(also Wondermark is great in general)
I swear I knew these fuckers were dodgy when I saw how UX designed their website was. A better search engine would sell itself even if it looked like craigslist.
The OP of that thread seems like the only one in the wrong here. The founder of the company they were criticizing reached out to them directly to clarify some misunderstandings and they instantly took a curt, defensive attitude in their replies. Replying to every email someone sends and rage baiting them doesn’t exactly read: “I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”
The only thing I thought was an error on the CEO’s part (not regarding his views, just the way he handled himself) was the long followup email when the blog author said he wasn’t interested in debating with him. That email should have been a blog post of its own if it was worth writing in the first place, imo.
About his views, though: I’m turned off by his lack of regard for user-supplied details as PII. For me to use a search engine that requires an account, and therefore associates all of my searches with me directly, I would need to be supremely confident that my information is in good hands. Otherwise, how am I better off than using any other search engine on the internet without an account?
I’m glad I read through this post, Kagi has been on my radar but I hadn’t looked into it enough to decide if I might have any interest. Seems like the answer is, at least for now: no.
100% agree. The “don’t want to be cornered into a call” sounds more like OP is afraid of being proved wrong. The CEO was very generous in addressing their concerns personally, OP was the one that took that as an attack.
lol, go fuck yourself
You’re really easily offended and you seem to blow everything out of proportion.
we don’t care
apparently you do care enough to reply
what a riveting point to make as your body is converted to chocolate chips
I don’t want to enagage with you on this while I keep engaging with you.
I don’t know if “no, I’m not interested” counts as engagement…
Right, that’d be like counting a verbal rejection as a date lmao
If the CEO respected peoples boundaries, all communication from him should have stopped right then, meaning there would be nothing to “keep engaging” with. It’s a massive red flag for both him and you.
Of course if they respected peoples boundaries they wouldn’t have been tracking them down and emailing them in the first place, but at least that’s a grey area.
I knew something was fucky about that cultish service.
Yeah I had a weirdass email exchange with that same guy that pushed me away from Kagi forever. It was one of those “borderline technically honest but still blatantly dodging and obfuscating” type situations.
I shared a screenshot once, but got nothing but defense for the guys dodgy behavior, so I’ve been quiet about it, so this feels pretty validating that my gut feelings were right.
I think a lot of people get cultish about it because they’re paying a subscription for it, so they have to believe it’s good.
yeah, they’ve fostered an audience of unhinged stans
huh. the modlog is wild. my commiserations.
this thread has been an excellent honeypot for some of the worst people on Lemmy, and TechTakes definitely needed some cleaning up now that our threads keep hitting all
it’s very funny to see how those posters react to the idea that their fucking garbage takes in defense of an asshole CEO aren’t welcome here, and that we have a minimum standard they just aren’t meeting. there’s this weird concept in a lot of folks’ heads from shareholder-oriented social media like Reddit that every community is for them and has to suffer their garbage, but that thankfully isn’t the case here.
it’s also hugely amusing that the default Lemmy behaviour is mod-removed comments get removed from their home instance too
proposal to change the mod button to be a mini icon of a nuke
for maximum points, a small animation of a nuke from orbit
Maybe it’ll stop being evangelized so heavily in every single search engine thread now, honestly just manipulative behavior from the CEO
We can only hope. I like the idea, the execution is just increasingly becoming shite.
Not immediately, I guess. But it’s sad to see that good things don’t just happen themselves
I’d say he’s a milquetoast narcissist at best, his boilerplate deflectons were totally hinged the whole time.
running through the sales playbook big time over a post with no readers
and now the original blog post, which had almost no readers, is front page on HN as I write this, and (in between the sociopath apologetics) people are noticing he’s bizarre on privacy, GDPR and AI obsession …
AI obsession
To be fair, of all the problems with that CEO, this one I fail to see
It isn’t in this post, but it’s in the post this one is about. Kagi started as an AI company, pivoted to the search engine, and it’s still trying to put AI into everything.
They didn’t pivot.
The search engine was just a side Idea What Needs Making the CEO had, that just happened to make the startup famous because of being somewhat less bad than the enshittified crap other search engines have become, then they lost interest (to be fair they seem to be about fifteen to twenty-something people, plus whoever they’ve got in Germany making free T-shirts, only half of them working full time, so there’s only so much they can focus on) and went back to their main thing (which is apparently very bad but very fast AI).
At this point they’re probably just keeping the paid search engine to try and pay back the taxes they owe due to having apparently forgotten taxes were a thing, though it was operating at a loss even before the tax thing (and before they wasted a third of their investment cash on free T-shirts), so they’ll be having to raise their prices…
Dare I say… womp womp?
wat
Yeah this is a big overreaction to someone defending their life’s work. I see nothing wrong here. The writer’s immediate and thorough disinterest in discussion doesn’t make the owner wrong to explain, and to call it mansplaining when you say you won’t even read it?
this sorta shit is why the pinned comment. bye now.
Repeated messaging or communication when the person has been asked multiple times to stop communicating is harassment, they aren’t on some public channel where he’s explaining to the masses, he’s just harassing someone who’s asked him multiple times to stop.
I think a lot of folks, in my experience especially those who didn’t grow up with the Internet, don’t see online interactions as “real” as offline. I think it explains a lot of the harassing behavior we see online.
For the peanut gallery, if someone asks you to stop communicating with you but you persist, it’s harassment regardless of the venue.
I’d like to think so, but I think you’re being unduly generous here and actually they’re just entitled shitheads
Eh, nothing wrong with accepting payments in crypto. Sometimes the gas fees are a lot less than what a payment provider / credit card provider would charge.
wow, you’re fucking lost aren’t you
let me show you the way out
This post has been a real honeypot, hasn’t it?
(Can we try mixing the honey with a little borax so they bring it back to the nest, like you can do for ants?)
I was thinking the same thing earlier… it’s also been a hell of a way to find people who have problems with consent…
we’re not actually enjoying what a shooting gallery this post has become
could never imagine that you would. grateful that you do what you do!
2018 called, it wants its shitty coiner propaganda talking points back
(actually not sure if by 2018 coiners had moved on from dunking on credit card fees)
No clue why they’d willingly accept crypto - they aren’t doing anything that’d have credit card companies running for the hills.
i was impressed enough with kagi’s by-default deranking/filtering of seo garbage that i got a year’s subscription a while back. good to know that this is what that money went to. suppose i’ll ride out the subscription (assuming they don’t start injecting ai garbage into search before then) and then find some other alternative
switching topics, but i do find it weird how the Brave integration stuff (which i also only found out about after i got the subscription) hadn’t… bothered me as much? to be exceptionally clear, fuck Brandon Eich and Brave – the planet deserves fewer bigots, crypto grifters, and covid conspiracists – but i can’t put my finger on why Kagi paying to consume Brave’s search API’s just doesn’t cause as much friction with me. honestly it could be the fact that when i pay for Kagi it doesn’t feel like i’m bankrolling Eich and his ads-as-a-service grift, whereas the money for my subscription is definitely paying for Vlad to
reply-guy into bloggers’ inboxes who are critical of the way Kagi operatescorrect misunderstandings about Kagi.Actually, that email exchange isn’t as combative as I expected.
I’m not going to de-anonymize my search history, so Kagi isn’t a thing for me, but he doesn’t seem as unhinged as some of these other techbros.
I am coming from cold on this, I knew kagi existed, It was on my bucket list to do research before even considering any trial, well kagi is not for me since I will never make an account to search web.
That being said, I read through both the blog and the email chain, and I was still so confused on whose side to take i read through OP’s other articles and comments and oh my god. Only thing i concluded is Vlad may have crossed boundaries in terms of emailing someone against their wishes, but the email chain wasn’t enough for me conclude he is narcisst, OP however is definitely pot calling the kettle black.
(I’m aware this is just a copy paste of another comment i made on parent level, but that was me fat fingering where to reply, I meant initially to reply to this comment, but ended up replying to OP, anyway I’m gonna keep both)
Actually, that email exchange isn’t as combative as I expected.
i suppose the CEO completely barreling forward past multiple attempts to refuse conversation while NOT screaming slurs at the person they’re attempting to lecture, is, in some sense, strictly better than the alternative
The bar hasn’t been so high in a while, christ that’s sad.
That’s a really fucking low bar. Remember to bring plenty of rope, emergency o2, and extra lights, should you go seeking it.
I’m just trying to use independent search engines with their own index/crawler. I used DDG for many years but the fact that it’s basically a front end for Bing and Microsoft started to bother me, particularly since they put ChatGPT into Bing.
I only know of Brave Search, Mojeek, and Kagi to be independent and private at this point. I don’t want to pay for Kagi, Mojeek has its uses but I wouldn’t use it as my main engine, so that left Brave Search. The company and CEO is sus, I don’t use their chromium browser, and their search results seem to emulate and optimize ranking based on the big guys (Google and Bing) but in 2024 search is hard to come by and it’s more important to me to be fully independent of big tech.
are you able to let us know what you use Mojeek for? Just interested in where we slot in
Tldr: I like your ranking algo. Feels like a breath of fresh air reminiscent of the old days of search and internet
Long version: When I want to get results for a query, not for an intent per se, I use Mojeek.
It works best for certain types of queries. When I want to get out of the commercialized, centralized, sanitized, SEO-ridden bubble that is every other search engine, Mojeek let’s me find way more potentially obscure, unique, and satisfying results per query that likely wouldn’t rank favorably with the modern page quality criteria used by Google. Plus, compared to the same 5 websites you’ll see for every query on other engines because of that very criteria, Mojeek has way more diversity in sources.
With all these corporations incentivized to further commercialize and consolidate the internet and with the rise of AI as a source of knowledge, Mojeek is one of the places I hang onto to explore a web of humans instead of a web of reputation and money.
Thanks a lot for sharing such a detailed rundown of what you find Mojeek to be useful for. I’ve shared this with the wider team.
This being said, if you have things that you’d like to wing our way in terms of improvements, or feedback on individual results, our inbox is always open (aloe at mojeek dot com) and there’s a submit feedback button on results pages. Mojeek thrives and grows off of feedback, the good and the bad 🙏
We need open search. Like Wikipedia for search, or something.
I saw this post earlier that mentions some other search options, along with plenty of other suggestions in the comments. Hopefully you can find something you like in there! I haven’t checked them all out myself yet.
I don’t use Kagi. Frankly, I hadn’t heard of them before this, but I’m not sure what classifies this as unhinged narcissism. I don’t know if there’s more to see but what I saw was an email trying to address concerns with the product.
No “apologist” stuff here, I’m just not sure why this would be classified as unhinged narcissism. Can someone explain? Genuinely would like to know.
The main reason is that the CEO continues to respond after 2 requests to stop the conversation, it would’ve been more appropriate after the request to just simply make a blog post or something addressing the points made on the blog post itself without naming the author, that way they’re talking to their community about community concerns.
Repeated responses via direct message after being asked to stop 2+ times is harassment. The initial reach out itself was perfectly fine and expected, but respecting when someone doesn’t want to engage in the conversation directly, and reaching out to the community in its entirety about the concerns is what should’ve been done by the CEO here for this to have ended in a better way for everyone.
oh hey, you’re also an apologist for the bigot Brendan Eich so thanks for making it easy to determine that this stupid bullshit is a pattern for you
